


chthonic

by novensides



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (Flashbacks), Chamber of Secrets, Gen, Hogwarts Founders Era, Horcruxes, Not Canon Compliant - Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-24
Updated: 2018-06-06
Packaged: 2019-05-13 04:56:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 14,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14742384
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/novensides/pseuds/novensides
Summary: The basilisk is not the only thing lurking under Hogwarts.Of all the secrets the ancient castle holds, the Chamber is not even near the strangest.





	1. foundering ships

**Author's Note:**

> chthon·ic  
> ˈTHänik/  
> adjective  
> adjective: chthonic; adjective: chthonian
> 
> concerning, belonging to, or inhabiting the underworld.  
> "a chthonic deity"

**I. The Dreadful Infant (There was the glory of innocence made perfect; there was the dreadful beauty of infancy that had seen God)**

 

When Harry Potter was younger, he used to lay in his cupboard at night, staring at the ceiling. The house on Privet Drive would be still and quiet, and the sloping plaster above him was, in the darkness, indistinguishable from the walls around him.

If he lifted his arm he could touch it, but in the all-encompassing black, so long as he stay still, he could imagine that the cupboard wasn’t there.

He might be in a vast field, staring at the starless sky. He might be anywhere at all.

Unlike most children, he had never been afraid of the dark. He rather liked it, in fact. He liked that he could project anything onto the pitch-black canvas that surrounded him. He liked even more that there was no difference between the dark closet and the darkness behind his eyelids when he closed them. He liked that sameness. It felt _honest_ , somehow, when his interior world and that around him matched. It felt _right._

Even then, he valued, above all else, honesty and rightness.

In the dark, dreams and reality, however real, however wretched, felt as though they were cut from the same cloth.

Now Harry was nearing twelve, and he had a room of his own – Dudley’s spare, outfitted with the bare minimum of furniture, but a room all the same. He was glad of that, but sometimes he found it hard to sleep. Sometimes he woke up and instinctively reached for the rough bit of plaster that had been just above his head in the cupboard, and he found only air.

Sometimes he woke from nightmares about Professor Quirrell’s face burning underneath his hands, and he wished for a moment that the familiar walls of his cupboard would close around him like a womb, like a nest.

It had always felt very much like being held.

He thought about that night with the stone, with Voldemort, often. He thought, too, about what Professor Dumbledore had said, in the Hospital Wing afterwards.

 _Love_ , he’d been told, had saved him. His mother’s sacrifice. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe it, it was only that he’d never seen love. Not like that.

When people stared at his scar, it was Voldemort’s face they were imagining. It was killing curse green, it was magic so terrible most could only dream of it. But it wasn’t seeing that, thought Harry, that made him special. No. It was that he’d seen love – pure, all-encompassing, perfect love, more dreadful than any curse, and more powerful. He could not imagine such magic, could not put a picture to it. When he tried, he saw only blinding light.

 

 

**II. Foundering Ships**

 

Later they would say it was a collective idea – all of theirs at once, somehow, as though they shared one mind. Of course they would. They liked, even then, to present a united front. When one is doing something radical, when one is trying to change the world, it’s good for both morale and one’s mortality to have allies. A lone target is an easier one to hit.

Even now, when she remembered them all in that time, Rowena imagined them like a hydra.

A rare four-headed Runespoor would, perhaps, have been more accurate.

Still, no matter who thought of it first, it happened. It _happened_ , though “it” was really a series of little events, not one singular enormous one, no matter how the history books recalled it. Building a school would alone take time, and strength, and magic, but they were not only building a school. They were forming a new system of thought. They were trying to change the way that people learned magic. They would do away with the apprentice/master system that favored wealthy students, or those from important families; they would turn magical learning into something accessible by _dozens_ of children at once.

(Later, it would become hundreds. Even they could not have forseen that).

It would be an understatement of the sort that Helga favored to say that there was contention. Each of them, even, in turns, found flaws in the plan over the years.

“We _all_ thought it was a good idea,” said Godric Gryffindor, ever the revisionist.

“You think any of his ideas are good ideas,” Rowena replied. There was no need to say who _he_ was. “Especially at first. All of this—”

“It wasn’t only his – and don’t tell me you regret the school. You love it, don’t you? Teaching – so much knowledge in one place?”

“So much _danger_ in one place, so much threat – so many children with their half-wild magic. Feral little things raised by hedgewitches mixed in with the sons of noble lords. It’s _volatile_ , Godric, and you know it. One day soon we’ll go up in flames.”

“Flames are my specialty,” he said. “Or have you forgotten? We’ve got failsafes upon failsafes, Rowena. Nothing is going to happen. And things will settle over time – they’re bound too. You’ve heard Helga. They – _we_ – aren’t peasants and lords, we’re wizards and witches, all of us, and that’s what matters.”

That had been – what, year three? _Yes_ , she thought. Year three, just after the summer solstice, just after one of Rowena’s favorite students had blown himself to bits. No wonder she’d been in such an awful mood.

He wasn’t the first one she’d lost. The student mortality rate had been rather higher then. No higher than the average witch or wizard’s _outside_ the school, of course – if witch-hunters didn’t find you, pestilence would. Still, she’d cared for him, and he’d only been about thirteen, one of her youngest.

(It would be many years before every student began and ended their education at the same age, just as it would be many years before they had a set curriculum).

Her students were admittedly prone to accidents, being more curious than most. She still thought them better off than Godric’s, who hacked at each other with swords half the time.

They were the only teachers, then, and they each had branches of magic they favored. They each had elements they aligned with – Godric fire, herself air, Helga earth, and Salazar water.

It was exceedingly rare to find a group of witches and wizards so well-balanced. And they were, truly – they had been. It was only when they paired off, faced each other one-on-one, that things could go off-kilter.

She and Godric, together, were a wildfire. He and Salazar rendered each other powerless and moot, cancelled each other out – whether for good or ill, it depended, on the circumstances or your view of it. Helga and Salazar, water and earth, were perhaps the most fruitful. Together, their magic grew crops. It nourished.

They, at least, could be trusted alone.

She never had been sure what water and air made. Rain, she supposed. A water cycle, an endless feedback loop, water falling and evaporating and falling again…

-

Once, they had all been aboard a ship. It was early still – their school existed only in daydreams and drunken ramblings – but they were each already friends, and together they were seeking out a mage overseas who claimed to have created a sort of magic that could hide an entire village from the non-magical.

It had rained on the ship, water above and below, and she recalled feeling helpless, hopelessly seasick, like she’d never be better again. Like she’d never see land or walk steadily.

When they finally arrived, she’d set herself creating a new spell straightaway.

“What are you working on?” Godric had asked later, finding her in one of the rooms of the warren-like structure Helga had made for them almost wholly with magic. That, creation, rendering something out of nearly nothing, was her specialty.

“Magic that can take you from one place to another,” she said. “One moment, you’re here - and the next—” and with a turn, a cracking sound like wood splintering underfoot, she vanished. She took a moment to delight in the way Godric stumbled backward as she reappeared again a yard away from him.

He swore under his breath, and she smiled. “I’ll never have to take to sea again.”

Godric threw his head back, laughing. “Only you,” he said.

And that had been him at his best and brightest, her favorite version of him.

-

She remembered now, she ended their fight over the school with guilt. She’d felt guilty – guilty that she was shouting at her friend, guilty that she hadn’t kept a better eye on her student, guilty that her favored, experimental branches of magic were so dangerous. Guilty she would never give them up.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that she _thought_ she’d felt guilty.

She did not know, yet, how true guilt felt. She did not know how it felt like being thrown into the ocean with a stone tied around you, struggling towards a surface you would never reach.

 

 

**III. The Archbishop and the Controller of Fire**

 

The spark that lit the wardrobe of the dingiest, darkest room at Wool’s Orphanage aflame felt, to the small boy who watched it, like the beginning of something more than just a fire. It felt like the big bang. It felt like the creation of a universe.

Here before him was the proof he’d always wanted, proof that there was _more_. That _he_ was more. Nothing would ever be the same again.

The man wanted him to feel guilty, Tom could tell. He wanted him to be frightened. Really, he only felt ashamed that he’d been caught so easily, and that shame paled in comparison to his awe.

Awe that the Professor had been able to set his wardrobe alight with just a flick of the stick he held, awe that the flames hadn’t spread to the wall beyond.

He imagined controlling fire. _Yes_ , he thought. _I want that._

Reigning himself in, Tom blinked and tried to look, if not guilty, at least obedient. Like he’d behave himself in the future. Only he was not especially good at pretending that sort of thing, not yet. The other children at the orphanage had always seen through him, and the matron had too, and every teacher who’d ever paid more than a second’s attention to him.

No, he was not good at pretending to be contrite, at pretending to be feeling and normal _._ But he vowed to try – to learn, if only to ensure that he could stay at the school this man represented for as long as he had use for it.

He promised himself that he would learn to put on every sort of face he needed, and he would be _good_ at it. He would learn magic, and he would learn how to show people what they wanted to see, and he would use the latter until he was good enough at the former that he no longer needed to bother.

He promised himself all of this, and he smiled, and he hoped that it was a convincing enough sort of smile for the strange Professor Dumbledore to think he was only happy about what he’d learned today.

And that, too, was the beginning of something.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! welcome to chthonic. this story is kind of weird in both format and tone, so bear with me (or don't! It's quite short and I should be posting other stuff soon).
> 
> The section titles for this story come from Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Deep), specifically, the 18 lost works of that collection. The wiki contains the best sentence of all time (w/r/t HOW they were lost): "In his later years, De Quincey, working by candlelight, had an unfortunate propensity to set things — his papers; his hair — on fire."
> 
> way to go, dude.
> 
> Anyway! Want to see aesthetic stuff for this or sleeper (or future works?) go to pinterest.com/novensidess. Want to talk to me or see other stuff? Find me at novensidess.tumblr.com.
> 
> thank you for reading!


	2. god that didst promise

**IV. God that didst Promise**

 

He had been promised that Hogwarts was safe. Everyone said it – that Hogwarts was the safest place on earth. Hagrid, and Hermione, and Dumbledore himself. It was Dumbledore’s word that meant perhaps most of all. He promised Harry he would always have a home at Hogwarts, and Harry, unused as he was to promises being kept, _listened_.

Still, it was disconcerting to also hear the words of the strange creature who called himself a House Elf. He said that great danger would befall Harry at Hogwarts, and Harry felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

-

You see, Harry Potter was a clever little boy.

He wasn’t quite as book smart as his friend Hermione, who in second year already had professors saying she was destined for something great, and he didn’t excel at strategy, like his friend Ron, who would always be two steps ahead of everyone as soon as he learned to play life like he did wizard’s chess.

But he _was_ clever. Even if no one else saw it. Especially because they didn’t, because cleverness like Harry’s was something that hid itself out of necessity – cleverness like Harry’s was all about necessity. It was about observing, about connecting one thing to another.

Harry had learned, when he was very small, to see things that other people didn’t. He had learned how to connect cause to effect, to figure out what the things he saw meant and what was likely to happen because of them.

His uncle Vernon’s face turning a certain shade of purple meant that he was going to start shouting soon, and that Harry should either keep very still or hide, depending on the circumstances.

(His type of cleverness also involved being able to choose the best - or at least, least painful - option for the circumstances). 

Harry knew which type of taunt from Dudley meant he was in the mood for Harry Hunting, and so Harry should run, and which type meant that Dudley was just going to take a swing at him on the spot, and so Harry should duck.

He knew that when his aunt got a certain pinched look about her mouth that he should make himself scarce, but another type that centered on the eyebrows meant she could probably be appeased with Harry quickly and quietly doing his chores, and if he did them well enough, she might even feed him a bit extra.

This wasn’t to say that Harry didn’t sometimes ignore the things he knew he should do in favor of what he wanted to do instead, which was usually to yell back at Vernon, or to call Dudley names, or to pull a few of Aunt Petunia’s prized tulips along with the weeds when he was gardening.

Harry had done all of those things at least once, and he knew he would probably do them all again, no matter how many times he was locked in his cupboard without dinner, because while he was clever, Harry was also very impulsive.

Some people scolded him for his lack of self-control, and other people shrugged and said it was probably because he was a Gryffindor – only Harry thought that last one wasn’t it, because Gryffindors were known for courage, and courage and impulsiveness weren’t the same thing.

Sometimes they looked like it, but Harry knew that courage often took the form of not doing something that you really, really wanted to. It was sort of like what Professor Dumbledore had said about Neville – that it took bravery to stand up to your enemies, but even more courage to stand up to your friends.

It all came back around to Harry’s special sort of cleverness – because even if he’d never put it into words, even if he was too ashamed to even think it, the times when he looked at his uncle’s shaking chin and thought he’s really going to lose it, and I’d better get out of here, and he’d gone and hidden in his cupboard under the stairs instead of yelling back, those were the times when he’d been really brave.

Charging forward into battle was all well and good, but sometimes getting through another day unbruised was the bravest thing you could do. After all, doing nothing could really be very frightening, because it meant acknowledging that, at least for the time being, there was nothing you could do.

What Harry didn’t know is that this last was why the hat had considered sorting him in Slytherin – or it was one of the reasons, anyway.

-

And all of that brings us to this: Harry Potter, who had begun his second year on edge, who was good at watching people and knowing when they were content and when they weren’t, when they were behaving like usual and when something was off, had noticed that his friend Ron’s little sister was acting very strangely.

He didn’t know the girl well at all, really, but he’d seen her the first time he’d boarded the train to Hogwarts, eager to go herself and upset at her brothers getting to go without her. He’d heard her family talk about her, and he’d seen her at the Burrow during his brief time there over the summer, and he could piece together what he thought she should be like from all of that and from a general assessment of the Weasleys.

The little girl he’d first met was shy around him, but stubborn, and none of the Weasleys, not even Percy, was very still or very quiet, not for long.

So he noticed when Ginny Weasley was sorted into Gryffindor but didn’t seem to make any friends, when she grew so pale that her freckles seemed to stand out even more against her skin. He noticed when she scrawled fiercely in a strange black book that he thought might be a diary.

And, impulsively, as he was sometimes wont to be, Harry stole it.

He took it from her bookbag one morning over breakfast, as her brothers Fred and George annoyed her by charming the sausages on her plate to do a jig. He was very quick and very careful, used to taking things without other people noticing – though admittedly it was usually bits of food he took, and from the Dursleys, who weren’t very observant at all. Still, the girl didn’t notice.

Perhaps if she’d have been more well-rested, he thought, she would have caught him sneaking the diary into one of the pockets of his robes, but as it was she looked as if she might fall asleep there on her plate if the twins weren’t bothering her so.

Harry finished his breakfast with Hermione and Ron and went upstairs to get his books and he thought for a moment about putting the diary in his trunk, but decided to keep it in his pocket instead.

It sat there all through classes and something – perhaps only the echo of Dobby’s shrill voice, but something all the same – told him _danger, danger, danger._ The hairs on the back of his neck would not lay still.

 

 

**V. Count the Leaves in Vallombrosa**

 

Milton wrote about Vallombrosa. _Paradise Lost._ A story of temptation and punishment. A story of being cast out from the only home you’d ever known.

He said he’d written it to justify God’s works to men.

Rowena wondered if they would ever be able to justify what they’d done to the world at large. She operated under no delusions; she knew they were not gods, but these days, the way people spoke of them, the way they invoked their names like oaths, it seemed as though they were as good as.

So – could she explain what they’d done, and why?

She could only hope, dearly, that they were never called to.

Anyway, it was funny to think that God might ever need to explain Himself. “Why should he, to mortal men? Why should we to _our_ lessers? They’re nothing more than motes of dust.”

That had been Salazar, because of course it had been.

“I don’t believe in God,” said Rowena. Not that one, anyway. She’d been raised with stories of trickier, earthier gods and goddesses, ones who, while equally unfathomable, at least got drunk on wine. They liked song, and dance, and that, to her, was preferable.

Long before Milton, but after their time all the same, a muggle Pope had addressed a congregation at Vallombrosa Abbey. He implored the Christians to take back their Holy Land, to restore whatever it was he imagined they’d lost. A common thread throughout history – if you can make people believe that they’ve been slighted, that they are wholly – _divinely –_ in the right, there’s very little they won’t do.

  1. That had been the year. After their time, yes, but only just.



She was happy to no longer be alive in the strictest sense when that call to arms came.

The Crusades, they called it, centuries later. Some things can only be named long after the fact. Of course, it would have been more apt to call it a massacre. No one was safe – not amongst the muggles, not even children, and not among their people.

No, witches and wizards died, too, by scores. Some were killed for practicing witchcraft outright, and some only because they’d been seen behaving strangely. They’d blended in better, once. The stronger they’d become, the less able they’d been at it. It was hard to fight the internal voice that said _I shouldn’t have to_.  

 

 

**VI. But if I submitted with Resignation, not the less I searched for the Unsearchable — sometimes in Arab Deserts, sometimes in the Sea**

The pieces were finally clicking together. Tom Riddle was close, very close, to finding out where he’d come from. He’d figured out that he must be descended from Salazar Slytherin himself once he’d learned what Parseltongue was, and Slytherin’s lines had, over the centuries, dwindled down to near-nothing. In Britain, only a few families remained, and he had finally ruled out all but one of them.

And now he stood at a precipice. _Once I find the truth, I can’t go back_.

His natural wariness had been sharpened to a point by his time at Hogwarts, by Slytherin house. His house was known for many things: resourcefulness, cunning, ambition, but Tom – Tom thought of it as the house of caution.

Still, what choice did he have?

Surely it was worse not to know. Surely being kept in the dark was worse.

Tom had little sympathy for those who self-deluded. Avoiding difficult facts was for the likes of Professor Dumbledore, and the professor was perhaps the man he hated most in all the world.

Because Dumbledore had known about Tom all along; he’d known his ancestry. Hadn’t he? He had to have known. _I can speak to snakes_ , Tom had said, and there was only one family who could do that. But the man had gone on letting him think he was a muggleborn, even after Tom had been sorted into Slytherin, the worst house for a muggleborn by far.

He knew Tom was friendless, penniless, and the one kindness he might have spared him – the knowledge that he had, somewhere, a family – he clutched greedily to his chest.

Once, he thought, the man had wanted him to fear him – he had set his things on fire with the effort most would use to swat a fly, and he had hoped that Tom would cower.

He did fear him now, finally, but not for that. He feared him for the clout he held, for the way that he could cast Tom out of the world he’d clawed his way up through with a word.

He feared the way the Dumbledore’s eyes seemed to never fully leave him. He watched him, suspiciously, always.

Every glance he gave Tom said _I see you_ , _and I can make you suffer._

 _Someday I will kill him_ , Tom vowed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Vallombrosa Abbey is the spot where, in 1096, Pope Urban II "addressed the congregation of Vallombrosa, imploring the religious amongst them to support the cause for a crusade to the Holy Land". 
> 
> John Milton also referenced "autumnal leaves that strow the brooks, in Vallombrosa" in Paradise Lost. 
> 
> _  
> pinterest: pinterest.com/novensidess  
> tumblr: novensidess.tumblr.com


	3. kyrie eleison

**VII. That ran before us in malice**

 

When it came down to it, Harry realized he knew very little about the history of the wizarding world. He had History of Magic, of course, but Binns only ever seemed to go over goblin rebellions. Harry couldn’t even be sure if they were working their way through in chronological order. If they were, he thought, he might be in seventh year before they reached the twentieth century.

Perhaps there were some bits of history he couldn’t have learned in class or from books, anyway, even if they _did_ have a competent teacher. After all, Hermione had devoured _Hogwarts_ , _A History_ and every sort of text that crossed her path, but it was still Ron who had to tell them what the word Malfoy had hurled at her earlier meant.

The worst part, Harry thought, was that she hadn’t looked surprised. Angry, yes, but not shocked – like she’d suspected such a word existed all along.

He supposed he ought not to have been surprised, either – that that there was a nasty word for witches like Hermione, or that Malfoy would use it carelessly in a schoolyard spat. After all, hadn’t Malfoy said that some families were “better than others”, that day on the train?

At the time Harry had thought he must be talking about how poor the Weasleys were, and Harry, used to being teased for his hand-me-down clothes and taped-up glasses, had come to Ron’s defense instinctively. But something under his skin had crawled at the way Malfoy said it, and looking back now, he realized he’d known, on some level, that the words went deeper.

Ron said that people like Malfoy had a word for him, too, and the rest of the Weasley family – they called them “bloodtraitors”, and Harry recalled Lucius Malfoy and Arthur Weasley fighting in the bookshop that summer. Harry thought about what that meant – to “betray” one’s blood. It implied that it ought to be ingrained and bone-deep to despise muggles and the muggleborn; that prejudice ought to be something that flowed through your veins.

Harry supposed it had been too much to hope that the magical world would be without its flaws. People were people, after all, magic or not, and if he knew anything about people, it was that they’d always find a way to hurt each other.

 

 

**VIII. Morning of Execution**

 

It felt like losing a limb, thought Rowena. It had felt like the end of the world, watching Salazar walk away, knowing that he’d never return. If it’d been Helga or Godric who stormed off, she would have thought _oh well_ , thought they’d be back in a day or a fortnight, whenever they’d worked off whatever rage had struck them. They would walk back sheepishly through those gates and said _I’m sorry, I don’t know what got into me._ Helga would come bearing gifts, and Godric probably dragging some witch or wizard behind him, or else a new pupil. He had the strangest way of turning up people, of roping them into his cause, whatever it might be at the time. He’d come bearing a new professor as though he’d dredged them up from a swamp or else winnowed them out of a hole in a log.

But this was Salazar, Sal who she knew like her own mind, who made promises and kept them, who, when he said he was leaving forever, she could trust to mean it.

_How had it come to this?_

They fought, and they fought, but of course they all had, over the years. They fought as naturally as breathing, and it had always come to nothing, or else it had inspired something brilliant, some magical solution to cause of their strife.

Godric and Salazar fought most bitterly of all, best friends though they were, because one was a spark and another the water that doused it. _Let’s do this_ , Godric would say, and Salazar would counter with all the ways it was a terrible idea, and they would rage for hours, and eventually they’d either arrive at a safer, subtler way to do the thing in question, or Godric would shrug and laugh his laugh that seemed as though it would shake mountains and say _you’re right, you’re right, old friend, you’re right,_ and that would be that.

Godric and Salazar were alike in that they were nothing alike, in that they were perfect opposites of one another, mirror images, a thing and its shadow. Godric forced Sal out of his labs when he hadn’t surfaced in weeks, Sal fetched Godric when he lost himself in the forest at the far reaches of the grounds.

Their symmetry was perfect until it wasn’t.

As it turned out, there were some things you couldn’t compromise on. There were some embers that never died out. Where Godric argued that they had a duty to teach every magical child they could find, that they had to teach them to defend themselves from the outside world, Salazar countered with stories of the viciousness of muggles who were even then engaging in a war against the unknown. How could they take students, he asked, whose parents would kill them if they knew the truth, whose villages would hunt them down and kill them, and their classmates besides?

 _We have a_ duty _,_ Salazar had said, echoing Godric’s words, _to defend_ ourselves _._

And Godric had scoffed at the very thought of a battle they could not win, and Salazar had spoken more scornfully than Rowena had ever heard him.

_When the demons are at your gate, I will not be here to help drive them away._

_The demons are inside_ you _,_ Godric said, reaching towards his temple, and when Salazar shoved him away, Rowena knew he’d retreated to a point of no return.

She knew him perhaps best of all.

Rowena and Salazar had never been different enough to balance one another – no, in many ways, they were the same. They both retreated into shadow, into terrible, impossible, complex magic that consumed them. Rowena withdrew easier, but only just. She remembered her responsibilities, only just, at the last minute, but that final minute was often the one that counted.

Many years ago, she’d been raised an ordinary girl, a girl whose mother brushed out her hair and braided it, whose older sister whispered in her ear that women were the ones who bore burdens, who carried the world on their shoulders like so many pails of water.

How relieved she had been when she found that she could shape the world by thinking it, when she found herself falling from the roof she’d shed her skirts to climb, falling to her death, and then – nothing. Everything stood still; she’d frozen time; she was alive.

She’d sworn, then, the only burdens she’d ever carry were her own. But sometimes, sometimes, that teaching was hard to shake.

For instance: when Salazar left, she wondered if she ought to go after him. But no – no, gods knew what her remaining friends would do without her, what her daughter, though near-grown by now, would do without her.

And so she stayed.

 

 

**IX. Kyrie Eleison**

 

Tom, of course, had no way of knowing if Salazar Slytherin’s chamber, wherever it may be, would open at the sound of Parseltongue, but it was the best bet that he had, and so he had spent the better part of the term roaming the halls after curfew, Disillusioned, whispering at passageways and paintings.

He’d found nothing thus far except an array of secret entrances and tunnels, but he supposed those were useful enough in their own right. Some of the portraits and tapestries, when they heard him hissing, turned clever eyes his way and said back _Slytherin’s heir_ , and _what would you like to know?_

They could not tell him where the Chamber lay, but they told him plenty of other things, he absorbed it all readily.

He seethed sometimes at how little he knew about the world that ought rightfully to have been his since birth. He was descended from one of the _Founder’s_ , for G- for _Merlin’s sake_. He deserved to know. He was _owed this._

He only knew of the Chamber at all through a throwaway passage in _Hogwarts, A History_. Binns had been characteristically useless when he inquired about it after class one day, Slughorn only marginally less so.

 _The Chamber is a myth_ , said Binns. _If_ , Slughorn said, _it exists at all, it is rumored to have a monster in it._

Tom had smiled charmingly at Slughorn. Not Binns – it was wasted on the ghost – but to Slughorn, at least, he’d said “well, then I’m sure it’s only a legend. Professor Dippet wouldn’t allow such a dangerous thing around students.”

Rubbish, of course. He had little doubt that Dippet and most of his predecessors were stupid enough to be unaware of a monster lurking underneath the school.

After all, they didn’t suspect a thing of _Tom,_ who’d been practicing dark magic since he learned to cast wards. Indeed, he had a gleaming gold prefect’s badge to prove just how beloved he was.

 _Correction_ , he thought, gritting his teeth. Dumbledore suspected. Dumbledore suspected him, if his wary looks were anything to go by, of doing worse things even than Tom had actually done. He watched him as if he were a murderer, a wolf set loose in a flock of lambs.

 _Just wait_ , Tom thought. He thought _I’ll show you a wolf._

_No, a snake._

His fury at Dumbledore, who lorded above him, who had withheld his heritage from him and now withheld his trust, had evened out over the years to a dull simmer. It was there, always there, at the back of his mind, but a larger part of him contented himself that soon he would find the Chamber, soon he would embrace his heritage, and someday, _someday_ , he would have revenge.

-

It was over the Yule holidays that Tom, growing desperate, tried his hissing in the second-floor girls’ washroom.

 _Open_ , he whispered, feeling as foolish as he ever allowed himself to feel.

And then one of the sinks slid away, revealing a gaping black mouth, a passageway to nothingness, and though he could not see beyond the darkness, he _knew_. He knew this was _it_ , and the foolish feeling was replaced with triumph.

 _Finally, finally, finally_ , he thought.

Finally he had what he deserved, finally he was special, finally he had a secret all his own.

He stood at the black hole, at the precipice, and licked his lips in anticipation.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> real quick note – I hope this is clear, but I am not defending Slytherin’s POV w/r/t muggles and muggleborn students. What you’re seeing is Rowena’s perspective, which is decidedly… neutral. 
> 
> This story is very much about the mistakes we make, and about characters who have the potential to do great or terrible things being nudged towards one or the other. It is not intended to come to the defense of the actions of the likes of Riddle or Slytherin. 
> 
> Also! Kyrie Eleison translates to “Lord, have mercy”.


	4. the halcyon calm

**X. The Nursery in Arabian Deserts**

 

Harry wondered, sometimes, when he’d first been placed in that cupboard underneath the stairs. He’d never dared ask, but he wondered. The cupboard was too small to hold a cot, but then, it was difficult to imagine the Dursleys buying him one, anyway. Perhaps they’d set him in there the very day he’d been found on their doorstep, in a laundry hamper or else a cardboard box.

He wondered if he’d cried very much, as a baby. He remembered being very small and not crying, but he wasn’t sure how far back his memories went. He might have been very small and not crying for quite a long time. After all, the backdrop of most of his memories was more or less the same: darkness, or a sliver of light from under the cupboard door that meant it was daytime. In these memories he might have been two or four or ten, it hardly mattered.

Now that he thought about it, the box theory seemed most likely. He wondered why he hadn’t been set on the doorstep with a basket at least. They might have used it. They also might’ve set it on fire – the Dursleys had whims of that sort, sometimes – but where it came to Harry, their thoughts mostly lead in the _waste not, want not_ direction.

Harry’s thoughts wandered to the snippets of biblical stories he knew. If he’d been left with a basket, maybe something of the religion the Dursleys claimed would’ve stirred in them, maybe they would’ve thought of Moses in the reeds. Maybe he’d have been raised as – well. Not a prince, certainly, the reigning heir was Dudley and always would be, but perhaps things might’ve been better.

Probably not. Harry didn’t think the Dursleys really were religious, not properly. They went to church some Sundays, and they attended special services on Christmas and Easter, and they looked down their noses at people when they thought they could get away with it for attending even more rarely than them.

Mrs. Figg was included in this last, because she never seemed to go to church, and Harry thought that was a little ungrateful (he’d have called it hypocritical, if he knew the word), because it was usually her and her cats the Dursleys left him with when they did go.

He supposed they didn’t want to bring him to church for the same reason they didn’t want to bring him anywhere, if they could get away with it, but the end result was that he’d never set foot in one that he knew of. His primary school had been secular, too. The only reason he knew about Moses at all was because the bible was one of the few books Aunt Petunia let in the house, and Dudley had an old illustrated children’s one that Harry had read front to back a dozen times before Dudley took a marker and drew funny things on the Adam and Eve hiding themselves in Eden behind fig leaves, and Petunia had found out, and of course Harry had been blamed for it.

Then he’d gotten called a heathen on top of everything else, and his Aunt had said it was to be expected from his father’s kind as she tossed him in the cupboard by his ear.

Back then, he’d thought she’d meant good-for-nothing-layabouts, but now he knew she meant wizards. He supposed that meant wizards didn’t go to church, or at least not the Church of England. He wondered if they did have a religion. Maybe they did – maybe they had one of their own, and he hadn’t heard about it because it was just another of those things everyone assumed he already knew.

There were a good number of things like that: things that Harry didn’t know, but didn’t know he didn’t know, because no one told him there was something to know about it.

Harry thought it worked a little like Neville’s Rememberall, which told you only that you’d forgotten something but not _what_. That was to say it didn’t work at all.

 

 

**XI. The Halcyon Calm and the Coffin**

 

After Salazar left, there was unprecedented silence in the castle. It might almost have been mistaken for peace, if not for the eerie quality of it, the unnerving density of a genuine void.

He’d left in the middle of a bright summer, one unusually warm. Because of it, there were fewer students in the castle than there might otherwise have been. During the long winters, students tended to stay, to linger, huddle in close as if for shelter.

In fairness, the castle did have excellent heating charms, courtesy of Helga.

At that time, just as there were no set terms, there were no established breaks. Instead, students came and went as needed. They returned to their families if called, to care for a sickly parent or an orphaned sibling, to inherit an estate, to marry, to fight.

Sometimes they came back to Hogwarts when their duties had been met to study further. Sometimes they stayed at the school for years and never went back to their homes at all, instead finishing their studies and then setting out in the world to make their fortune.

That summer, there had been many of the latter type. Young men and women had set out in droves, the heat sparking something ambitious in them. Many of those that left had been Salazar’s, which lessened the burden between the three founders who divided the work of teaching those that remained.

Rowena wondered if perhaps Salazar had warned them, if perhaps they’d known he was going to leave. Or maybe they’d felt it, predicted his departure like a change in tides.

His students had, some of them, understood his mercurial moods almost as deeply as Rowena.

More likely, though, it was only that his had always been the ambitious ones, and the ones who had nothing to return to.

His students were quiet in response to his absence, and the others were quiet in response to them. Helga was quiet because she mourned, because she was the best of them, and Godric either felt guilty, or as though if he spoke everything would break again. Perhaps both.

Rowena was quiet because she was thinking. She thought, long into the night. She planned. She dreamed, although she did not sleep. She became pale, her eyes ringed darkly, and let the others think she was upset over their colleague’s departure, or else ill. It mattered little so long as they left her alone, and they did, and she worked.

-

And then, like that, it shattered: the silence, her dream.

Helena had stolen away in the night with her diadem. This was not, as the history books declared, a great betrayal. Truth be told, the diadem had been a clever bit of magic, something that occupied her energy and time as she’d worked on it, but when she’d been done with it, Rowena had tucked it away somewhere and forgotten it existed.

When her daughter disappeared, she did not think, at first, to look for it at all. That would come later. Later, when the young Baron Algar suggested it. The baron had been one of Salazar’s. He’d left the school some years before, and if he’d had any particular interest in her daughter before that, she hadn’t known of it, but when Helena vanished there, suddenly, he was.

If she’d been in her right mind, she might have questioned it, but she wasn’t. She was tired, and she wanted to find her daughter. Magic or not, the world was not kind to young women traveling alone, something she recalled keenly. It was the baron who suggested that he seek her out, and Rowena recalled that he’d had a particular proficiency for blood magic. Blood was especially good in tracking people, and no strong suit of hers, and so she’d acquiesced.

She had not asked him why he imagined Helena had left, but he’d offered the information anyway. He said her daughter was envious of her intelligence and power, that she had long been, and that she coveted the diadem for herself. That she dreamed of wearing it and finding herself cleverer.

Rowena thought it ridiculous, and he presumptuous for imagining he knew more about her daughter than she did - but he was right. The diadem was missing. It stood to reason, when she discovered that, that he was right about the rest.

It would have been a terrible thing if Rowena had noticed her only daughter’s discontent and dismissed it. The truth, however, was more terrible than that: She had not noticed.

-

Rowena had focus like a bird of prey’s. She could see things from great distances, she could lock them in her sights, and when she had, she pursued them. She pursued them with a relentlessness that would have frightened people, if they saw her direct it at anything other than her studies.

Her attention was undivided, but to benefit from attention of that sort, it had to be directed at you.

It had not always been directed at Helena.

It had, perhaps, she could admit now, after all these years, these _centuries_ , rarely been directed at Helena.

-

Later, they would say she did not tell the others what Helena had done because she wanted to conceal the betrayal.

Later, she would wonder, _what betrayal?_ Had Helena taken anything she wasn’t owed?

In truth, she hadn't told the others because she felt ashamed. In truth, she wasn’t sure, at first, how long her daughter had been gone before she’d realized.

 _I have not been a good mother_ , she thought.

Helga, kind Helga, would never say so. Godric would draw his sword on anyone who suggested it. Years before, when the unwed Rowena told them she was carrying a child, they’d closed ranks around her. They promised to be her family, and they had – both of them had married, bothhad children of their own, and Helena had played with those children like they were her sisters and brothers. Helga had nursed her when she was sick, sewed her clothes. Rowena recalled thinking it would be enough.

It had not been enough.

And when word returned that her daughter was dead, that the baron had killed her and then himself, she thought she might deserve it.

-

 _I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry_ , she thought. Or she thought that now. It had been a very long time before she arrived at the point where she could think _I’m sorry_. It had not happened in what remained of her life, after, that short period between Helena’s death and her own. No – _then_ , in that awful time, her thoughts, had anyone heard them, would have sounded like a formless scream, like the wind howling, like everything, like nothing.

She had been hollowed out, and everything of substance in her was replaced with that scream. Not until the moment of her death was there silence. Not even then. The sliver of Rowena that remained in the world after she died cried out, as she never had in life, even as her coffin was closed, even as the lid was nailed into place.

 

 

**XII. Faces! Angels' Faces!**

 

_I do not want to die._

It was one of his first and clearest thoughts.

Perhaps not so unusual for an orphan – children’s thoughts do not stray naturally to death, but when the first thing one recalls knowing is that one’s parents are dead, what else is there to think of?

To be an orphan was to know that the entire circumstances of your life had been shaped by death. It was to be hungrier and colder than other children, with lesser care, and to know, therefore, that any illness might be your last.

And then, of course, there was the war – there were bombs, and air raid sirens. There were the walls of the orphanage that would crumble in an instant. There was the ever-present thought that Tom might die, and worse, that no one would especially care or notice.

No, not unusual that he would think often of death, that he would obsess over it. Tom was, still, of course, unusual, however, and so even as he thought these thoughts, he learned to hold the threat of dying over other’s. He killed their pets, trapped them in caves, pitted their helplessness against the insensible sea.

At the orphanage, he’d been taught that to die as an innocent child was to go to heaven. To die was to, perhaps, become an angel. But Tom was not an especially innocent child, and he did not want to become an angel. In the stained-glass windows of the church where the orphans were sometimes taken, paraded before the parish to remind them of their own good fortune, or else move them to donate, the images of angels looked down with patient, unnatural faces.

They regarded Tom as impassively as the unmoved parishioners, but their cool eyes were all the more infuriating because they were – allegedly, assumedly; he had never much believed in God – in possession of the power to actually help.

Later, when he discovered he had magic, he found he, too, held power over the ordinary man. He could look down on muggles with a face like stone, like the angels, like an angel of his own sort of church.

He discovered too, a new quest. One of the first things he’d sought out in this strange new world had been a way to subvert death, to put an end to it. He had been sick and afraid and furious to find out that, supposedly, it couldn’t be done.

What, he wondered, was the point of magic if it could not cheat death? Death, that most ordinary of villains, that plague too boring, too _commonplace_ to even be called evil. Death that came for kings and peasants, that did not discriminate.

The very idea made him feel wretched. He felt the indignity of fear anew.

But Tom also found, over the years, that there were many things wizards claimed were impossible that were merely _difficult_. They came at a cost thought too dear by most, but Tom was not most. Tom was extraordinary, and he put his extraordinary skills to work in research, in study. In charming Horace Slughorn, who had given him, at last, the final piece.

 _And now he had it._ He had found that which other wizards feared - foolishly, he believed, because what was there to fear in immortality? But he didn’t spare much time thinking on the folly of wizardkind. Instead he thought _yes, yes_ , he thought _finally_. He thought _finally_ as he had never thought _finally_ before.

This was the closest to happiness Tom Riddle would ever come: realizing that he might, at last, have found a way to live forever. Imagining death and for once not being caught in an undertow of despair. There was fear there, yes, fear such that it might have paralyzed anyone weaker, but there was something else. Something to grab hold to.

 _He would not drown_. He would not die. He would never die.

The feeling, which he would have identified as pleasure in his own brilliance, if he thought to, was in fact something much simpler and much older than that. It was hope.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! I haven't forgotten about this story. just been busy, etc.


	5. at that word

**XIII. At that Word**

 

Harry had the diary in his possession for several weeks before he opened it. In the end, it was the steadily growing frenzy of Ginny Weasley that drove him to. It still made the hairs at the back of his neck stand up, but what if it was – important, somehow? He didn’t want Ron’s sister growing ill or getting in trouble because he’d stolen something from her.

-

And then there was his worry she might try to steal it back.

He asked Hermione if she knew of any magical ways to lock your things so that other people couldn’t get into them. She’d looked suspicious until he told her Dean and Seamus were prone to pranks, and he didn’t want them getting into his trunk. He felt guilty for lying to her, but she’d taught him a little about wards, and together they’d managed to find a way for him to set a simple password on the trunk that kept the diary in it safe from Ginny or anyone else who might want it.

Harry wondered if he ought to take it to Professor Dumbledore, or McGonagall, even – but he’d never had much luck convincing the adults in his life to take his stories seriously. No, best that he figure out what the diary _was,_ first, before he ran off telling anyone about it.

And that was how he came to be sitting cross-legged on his dormitory bed, curtains closed, pen poised over the little black book as though he thought it might leap up and strike him.

“ _Hello,”_ he wrote in it finally.

“ _Hello,”_ someone wrote back. He nearly dropped the pen. “ _My name is Tom Riddle. What’s yours?”_

Harry hesitated. Licked his lips. He thought of the way people acted when they heard his name – like he’d _done_ something, _was_ something. They heard his name, and then everything else that came after was… different. He thought of Professor Lockhart dragging him to the front of class, the Slytherins sneering, everyone _whispering_ like his name was a spell in and of itself that invoked… strangeness.

“ _Dudley Dursley_ ,” he finally wrote. “ _Nice to meet you_.”

-

He slipped away before the feast Halloween night. He told Hermione and Ron he wasn’t feeling well, and he wasn’t – there was something pounding in his head that seemed to be more than an ordinary headache. They’d looked at him with pity, and it was only after he’d curled up in bed that he realized the date.

-

(In another universe, a ghost called Nearly Headless Nick invited Harry to his Deathday party after disrupting a meeting between Harry and Argus Filch. In this one, Harry never found himself in Filch’s office, because he hadn’t tracked mud into the halls after a Quidditch game. He’d lingered in the locker room, instead, to write in the diary he’d hidden in his satchel).

(Later, he asked Tom if he knew any spells to get mud off his shoes. Tom did.)

-

In this universe, Harry curled up in bed with the diary, feeling a strange compulsion to write. As he did, his headache abated, somewhat.

“ _Are you alone?”_ Tom Riddle asked in his perfect script.

“ _Yes,”_ Harry replied.

-

A boy who was not quite Harry Potter stood in a second floor girl’s bathroom. He was staring with unholy concentration at a sink, at a tap, one with a snake carved on.

“ _Open,”_ he hissed. And at that word, the Chamber of Secrets revealed itself for the first time in nearly fifty years.

-

By the time Mrs. Norris’ petrified body was found by students returning from the feast, Harry was back in his bed, fast asleep. Tom – or was it Harry? perhaps it was both – knew a spell that cleaned chicken’s blood off one’s shoes just as easily as it had cleaned mud.

-

_The Chamber of Secrets has been opened. Enemies of the heir beware._

The words echoed in Harry’s mind. He hadn’t seen them, but Hermione had them memorized. She and Ron were speculating, along with the rest of the castle, on the meaning of the words. What was the Chamber, and who was the Heir?

Harry felt a sense of… something. Something like déjà vu, something at the back of his mind, as though he’d just forgotten it –

Binns and McGonagall gave them the barest summary of things: the told them about Salazar Slytherin’s chamber, the monster it was rumored to contain. _Rumor_ being the operative word. According to them, it was only a myth.

Harry was far from the only student who didn’t believe that.

There was one other person – or entity - he might ask, of course, but Harry had tucked Tom Riddle’s diary away the day after Halloween. It was locked in his trunk, and he found himself frightened when he looked at it. It, too, gave him that strange sense that there was something he’d forgotten.

-

And then there was the dueling club. The snake. _He could speak to snakes._

 _How could he not have known?_ The snake in the zoo, the one he’d set free – how could he not have realized that there was something odd about that?

And with that, with a few hissed words, Harry was alone again. Even Hermione and Ron were looking at him strangely. He was alone – or, no, not quite.

Not quite alone, not yet.

 

 

**XIV. Oh, Apothanate! that hatest death, and cleansest from the Pollution of Sorrow**

 

She was not surprised when Salazar appeared in her study. He must have heard word of her state, near-death, somehow. Perhaps Helga had written him a letter. Or perhaps he had spies in the castle still, she mused, as the man paced across her floor.

And of course, he had ways to enter the castle secretly, as he must have done now – through his Chamber, and likely other routes she didn’t know of. Paranoid, reclusive Salazar, who kept secrets even from his dearest friends – not that she had room to judge, on that front.

She wondered, at times, what had made him this way. She thought it might have been his mother, a _euskaldunak_ witch – Basque, from an isolated, insular country at odds with the rest of the world. He never mentioned his father. He spoke his mother tongue, sometimes, still. Whispered it in his sleep. It was sibilant, twisting, so nearly like the snake language he spoke that she wondered if one reminded him of the other. He had never explained the origins of his gift, and never had she heard of anyone else with it. Perhaps it was something he had created. Perhaps he had made it, somehow, with some strange magic, to remind him of home.

Her thoughts were wandering. They did so often, these days. Salazar, by contrast, was focused – focused on her. He looked her over as though he had not seen her in centuries, when really it had scarcely been a year.

“You aren’t ill at all, are you?” he asked, because of course he saw it. Trust him to see what the others could not. Trust him to recognize the effects of dark magic. “You aren’t dying. What have you done?”

“Not yet,” she murmured in agreement to the first. “Nothing, yet,” she said to the second, though he didn’t look at all like he believed her. _Of course not._ They were consummate liars both, weren’t they? That had been what drew them together, once.

She regarded him coolly. “Now that you’re here,” she said, “I could use your assistance.”

“My _assistance_ ,” he echoed. “Rowena—”

She crossed the room to the wall beside her desk, reached out as though to touch it. Yes, they were liars both, so who better to help her in this?

Her fingers brushed the stones and they slid away, revealing a hole no larger than her head, from which she drew two books. One glossy black – covered in dragon hide, impervious to magic and most damage, priceless. This, she would leave behind, entrust to Helga. The other was a strange, sickly green. She knew that Salazar would recognize its cover. Also impervious to magic, also priceless, from the shed skin of his own precious basilisk.

It was this book she opened, turned to a certain page. Handed to him. He took it without thinking, eyes already fixed on the familiar cover.

He read quick as ever, eyes flying over the page. “This is - what is this?”

“Soul magic,” she said. “A form of – immortality, I think, is the wrong word. _Insurance_ , perhaps. A means of returning, someday. Of leaving a tether to this earth, after death. It’s dangerous, if you couldn’t tell. I’d like for you to destroy that book, after my death.”

“But you _aren’t_ _dying_ ,” he spat, throwing the book down on her desk. “You have a long life ahead, work left to do—" She noted bemusedly he had no objection to the magic itself, about its cost. Perhaps he hadn’t read that far.

“Do I? Look around you, Sal. I’m not needed any longer.” _We_ aren’t needed any longer, she might have said, if she were in the mood to be just a bit crueler. It was true – the castle had gone on without him, and it would go on without her.

When he left, she had realized that. That, no matter how important their work _had_ been, they were, now, all of them, no more than glorified child-minders. _Tutors._ She could retire, perhaps, retreat to her tower to study and write for the rest of her days, and no one would fault her for it. But that wasn’t what she wanted, either. They had set things in motion that would run without them, but someday those things would reach their inevitable conclusion.

She had imagined a rock rolling down a hill, rolling, until it met some new obstacle, yet to be seen, which it could not pass.

She wanted to be there when it did, to dislodge it.

And then Helena had died, and her research took a darker turn.

Everything, she realized, could end in a moment. And then – then what? Knowledge sought and gathered, for what? All this work for _what?_

She had created spells that had no purpose yet, rituals that were ahead of their time by centuries, millennia. She refused to leave them behind – and whose hands would she leave them in? Her only child was gone. She had no one else. If she were to teach what she’d created, she wanted to do it herself.

“This will be my legacy,” she said. “This is what I want. I want to return someday, when I’m _needed_ , I want…”

 _I want to change the world again_. Properly, this time, and not from behind the walls of a school.

“There’s so much more to magic than this,” she said, wondering if he’d realize she was quoting him.

Salazar stared back. As if he’d dissect her, like one of the creatures he turned into potions ingredients, as if he thought he could see through her.

Perhaps he could. _Water and air,_ she thought. Both transparent, up to a point.

“I’ve heard that He- that she’s returned,” he said finally. “That her spirit is within the castle.”

“She has,” agreed Rowena tonelessly.

“I’ve never asked before. Is – _was_ the girl…”

“You never asked before, no. Don’t start now.”

“ _Rowena_.”

“You can’t even say her _name._ Do you really want to know? Will that make it better? Worse? Would you mourn for the daughter you hadn’t known you had?”

Salazar said nothing, and she knew she’d won.

“Some secrets are best left that way,” she said.  

 

 

**XV. Who is this Woman that for some Months has followed me up and down? Her face I cannot see, for she keeps for ever behind me**

 

It was a funny thing to be haunted.

Tom felt it – something prickling the back of his neck, raising the hairs there. A gust of wind through the corridors, cold licking at his skin.

He heard it, too. A moan, perhaps, or a word, a syllable he could never quite make out.

But he never saw it. _Her._

He wondered if anyone else had yet. He thought knew who the ghost must be, and yet he’d not heard word that anyone had spotted poor Myrtle floating through the halls.

He hadn’t imagined that she would return. He didn’t think she remembered enough to incriminate him – she’d only seen the basilisk, surely. She’d been dead the moment she saw its eyes. She must have fixated on him because she remembered seeing him in the girl’s toilet, before her death, and he had already thought of a thousand lies he could tell Dippet to excuse his presence there, if he were questioned.

Still, the thought of it coming up at all was unnerving, and so he listened for rumors that Myrtle Warren had returned to haunt the castle.

There had been none.

Perhaps she was too weak to appear corporeally. To speak.

It made sense, he thought, that she’d be weak, even as a ghost.

He felt no remorse for the girl he’d killed, however accidental it had been. He felt only triumph – he’d found the chamber. He’d mastered the basilisk. He’d slipped, yes, but he’d blamed the incident on a half-breed and gotten him cast out of the school, which was as good an outcome as he might have planned, anyway.

And more importantly – he’d been able to use Myrtle’s death, unintentional as it was, to create his first horcrux.

And that, truly, was worth celebrating.

He could only hope the idiot girl’s ghost never managed to make itself seen.

-

She did not wish to be seen by him, and so she wouldn’t be. He had hurt her, and she was neither kind nor forgiving. Ruthlessness was not a named trait of Ravenclaw’s house, but she’d often thought it ought to have been one nonetheless. She’d spent her childhood, after all, in the shadow of the other girls’ whispers. Boys’ stares.

 _Are you clever enough for this house?_ They seemed to ask.

She was clever enough to know what they thought of her – her impure origins, her striving.

She had had plans to make them all sorry for it, one day. She was clever enough, certainly, to make those sorts of plans. She’d bide her time, and then -

And then she’d been murdered by _him,_  after all that. A senseless waste, and she had an eternity to hold a grudge over it. Here they were, in the same castle, and if she resorted to cheap tricks now and then to make him feel her presence, well. Who would blame her? A chill at his neck, a whisper half-heard – she only wished that she could drive him mad with it. If only he had that sort of constitution.

Alas, he’d always been too strong-willed for his own good.

But Tom Riddle was here, too. He had tricked her, too – and there were only so many times you could be tricked by a too-clever boy with a handsome face over a bloody tiara before you grew tired of it. The Baron _(the Bloody Baron, they called him, and wasn’t that just_ gauche _)_ was a ghost already, dead already, but Tom – she didn’t think she’d have much luck driving him mad, either, but she still planned to have her fun with it.

Once, she had thought he might be _important_ , the prodigy orphan boy. Once, she had seen familiar things in him.

He had reminded her of – of Salazar. He spoke the snake tongue. He had the same sort of eyes. Hungry.

She had noticed him. She had watched him, summarily, through the years.

 _Keep watch for me_ , her mother had said. The thing that had once been her mother had said. The whisper, the bodiless voice in the castle, the ghost of a ghost.

_Keep watch for me, and tell me when the time has come._

_When the time has come for me to redeem myself_ , she had not said, but Helena had heard anyway.

This was their agreement: someday, someone would come to this castle that could restore her mother to her former self. Helena would identify them. Select them. She would tell her mother, and she would guide this chosen one to where they were needed.

Rowena Ravenclaw had been known as one of the greatest witches of her time, of, perhaps, any time. Once, she had helped lead the wizarding world into a golden age, an era of growth and prosperity. She had been one-fourth of a force that had changed the world.

A force that could change even one-fourth of the world was one to be reckoned with.

Someday someone would come who would have Rowena Ravenclaw’s loyalty and her assistance. She would aid them, and the world would change again.

Tom Riddle, Helena decided, would not be that someone. He had fooled her once, had gotten the story of the diadem from her. He had opened the Chamber of Secrets and claimed Slytherin’s monster as his own. He’d even had the nerve to kill a student with it – a Ravenclaw girl, an outcast, and didn’t that _sting._

But he would never know his mother’s best-kept secret. He would never know that something stranger and darker than the basilisk lurked inside the castle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apothonate, from Rowena’s section title, appears to be a proper noun derived from the term apothonasia, meaning “Postponement of death; prolongation of life, as opposed to euthanasia. [G. apo, away, + thanatos, death]”. 
> 
> Also, if you’re unfamiliar with the Basque people, you should absolutely go look up Basque country and enjoy my weird headcanon involving Salazar Slytherin originating from that region. I find their mythology/religious history especially interesting. 
> 
> From Wikipedia: “[Ancient Basque religion] would be considered a chthonic religion”. 
> 
> (And now you know where the title comes from!)
> 
> “One main figure of this belief system was the female character of Mari. According to legends collected in the area of Ataun, the other main figure was her consort Sugaar.”
> 
> On Mari: “Legends connect her to the weather: when she and Maju [also known as Sugaar] travelled together hail would fall…Mari was associated with various forces of nature, including thunder and wind.”
> 
> And with regards to Maju/Sugaar: “He is normally imagined as a dragon or serpent…The name Suga(a)r is derived from suge (serpent) and -ar (male), thus "male serpent".


	6. the dogs that come with curious eyes to gaze

**XVI. Cagot and Cressida**

 

Harry walked through the halls of Hogwarts and was met with whispers, uneasy glances, the sense that he was unwanted, unwelcome.

 _It’s like primary school all over again_ , he thought. In primary, Dudley and his friends made it clear the other children weren’t to play with Harry, weren’t to talk to him. But sometimes Harry wonders if they even needed to. People steer clear of him as if by instinct. After all, the teachers had leaned away from him, too, and that can’t have been by the sway of school-aged bullies.

He wondered if perhaps there was something wrong with him. He remembered watching a nature program once. It was about different sorts of animal mothers – snakes, birds, monkeys. Some, the program said, could sense when their babies wouldn’t survive. When they were too small or sick. Some of them left their doomed young to die, or else killed them, pushed them out of the nest.

Maybe it was a bit like that. Maybe other people sniffed out something in him that even he didn’t know was there, something that said he was sick or _off_ , that he didn’t belong.

He wondered if Tom knew what that was like. Something told him he might. He’d watched one of the boy’s memories in a diary, and there had been something about him, something _familiar._ Harry felt like they might have things in common.

But he felt, too, that there was something _dangerous_ about the other boy. It was the way his eyes flickered, maybe. Harry thought he’d seen a flash of anger there.

And anyway, if he told Tom about his exile in Hogwarts, he’d have to tell him the whole story, or else come up with some reason why “Dudley Dursley” would be cast out.

No, this, he thought, he would keep to himself.

-

But he did write in the diary again.

-

This time, when he reached the Chamber entrance, the part of Harry that was _Harry_ was close to the surface and battling for control. He was aware, distantly, that something was happening. That something was going to happen. He thought, _I have to stop it. I have to stop him—_

He thought he saw someone, from the corner of his eye, someone in the room with him. They flickered.

Perhaps it was Moaning Myrtle. He felt the telltale chill of a ghost nearby.

Perhaps –

 _“Aren’t you going to open it?”_ someone whispered in his ear. A girl – a woman – and the part of him that was Tom hissed the word before he could stop him. Harry sunk, again, into the ocean of his own mind.

Then there was darkness.

-

But in the Chamber, before ~~Harry Tom~~ _he_ could reach the statue, Salazar Slytherin in stone, whose mouth slid wide to let the monster free, something stopped them.

Some _one_.

A woman stood in the Chamber, or no, a ghost, perhaps, thought Harry as he took Tom’s momentary surprise as a shot to slip to the surface. She was, in the green glow of the Chamber, ever-so-slightly transparent. But she did not look like any ghost he’d ever met, for all that her robes were very old, like things he’d seen in paintings in the castle. Perhaps it was the way she carried herself, like she was capable of cursing him if she wished.

“Who are you?” someone said. It was the sliver of a thing in Harry, the voice too cold to be his own.

Harry shivered. The woman _smiled._ “None of that, now,” and she raised a hand, and something shot at Harry and before he could summon up the force to duck, it struck him, and then—

Then he felt the air return to his lungs, the breath he hadn’t known he was holding, and the woman smiled at him again.

Harry was Harry, and Tom was gone. “Is he…” he began.

“Back within his little book, for now,” said the woman. She smiled again. She had long, dark hair and large, dark eyes and Harry thought she looked like she knew the secrets of the universe. “ _Who are you?”_ he wanted to ask, but he remembered what she’d done to Tom for it, and as glad as he was to have the – _whatever_ Tom was, out of his head, he figured it was best not to risk it.

“Hello, Harry Potter,” she said, filling the silence.

“Where are we?” he asked, hoping that was safe. “Is this—”

“The Chamber of Secrets, yes, I’ve heard it’s called. Awful name. Salazar would’ve either loved or hated it. Frankly, I’m not sure.”

Harry blinked owlishly at her.

“Oh – do you understand me?” she asked. He thought her voice had a strange lilt to it, music-like, bird-like. “I’m sorry. I’ve… learned… your language by immersion, you could say. I’ve had little chance to practice it, over the years.”

He blinked again. The vein of politeness that lived in Harry Potter made him speak next. “Oh, no, you’re – I understand you. It’s just… it sounded like you _knew_ Salazar Slytherin, just then.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Of course,” she said. “I haven’t introduced myself. My name is Rowena Ravenclaw.”

-

At first Harry thought he must be dreaming. It was all a strange dream – his possession, the fact that Tom from the diary had the _power_ to possess him, the Chamber, his half-memories of the monster and summoning it forth on Halloween. And, of course, Rowena Ravenclaw, or the woman who claimed to be her, who claimed to be, not a ghost, but some sort of – well. He wasn’t clear on that.

“A memory, you might say,” she murmured.

“That’s what _he_ said,” Harry pointed out, warily. “Tom. He said he was a memory trapped in a book, or something like that.”

“I suppose he would,” she said. “I am… not unlike that, but I promise that I don’t mean you harm. Quite the opposite, in fact. If you’d agree, I’d really like to help you.”

“Help me?” Harry repeated slowly. He was wary still. He was, generally, wary of people who offered to help him. “That means you want something from me,” he said before he knew it. He clamped his mouth shut quickly, because the _memory_ had already shown herself capable of doing magic, and he had no idea how to get out of this Chamber, but he did know, from his half-retrieved recollection, that Slytherin’s monster was a ruddy big snake and it was here somewhere.

“Yes,” she said simply, and Harry stared at her. “I do.”

He gnawed at his lip, unused to such frankness, especially from an adult. Or a memory of one.

“I do have a favor to ask of you,” she went on quietly, “But I promise you – it will be worth it. Do you know who the boy who led you here is? Tom Riddle? Or rather, I should ask – do you know who he _became?”_

It was the _became_ that did it, set the gears in Harry’s mind whirring. But surely not—

“I’m afraid so,” Rowena said. “The diary contains a memory of the schoolboy who would, later, become your Lord Voldemort.”

“He’s not _my_ anything,” Harry spat back.

“No, certainly not,” she agreed easily. “But the thing of note is that he does have – anchors. Tethers, to this world, and that diary is one of them. He is not, as you may think, wholly dead.”

Dumbledore had implied as much, but Harry’s heart sank anyway. There was something in the way she said it, certain, that told him that it must be true.

“But he _could_ be,” she said. “I know a little about the method he used. I could help you – help you find his tethers, help you destroy them. Help you defeat him, once and for all.”

“I’m twelve,” Harry pointed out incredulously.

She smiled. “A little at a time, then. There are all sorts of things that I might teach you. I did, after all, help found the school in which you’re standing.”

Harry’s mind reeled at the possibilities. If she were telling the truth—

“What is it that you want?” he asked slowly.

Her smile grew wider.

“Come,” she said. “Let’s speak somewhere nicer.”

 

 

**XVII. Lethe and Anapaula**

 

“We each had a space of our own in the castle,” Rowena told Harry as she guided him through the halls. The portraits took no notice as they passed. The staircases seemed to move for them, helping them along instead of hindering as they were sometimes wont to do.

They recognized their maker.

“You’ve seen Salazar’s. Perhaps Helga’s, too? Have you ever encountered a room which takes whatever form you need from it? On the fifth floor, now, I believe.”

“No,” the boy said. “But Professor Dumbledore might’ve mentioned it once. He said he found a room full of chamber pots.”

She snorted. _Yes,_ that sounded like Helga’s doing. Her legacy was two-fold: a space that became whatever you needed, filled with whatever you asked, but was, when left without a visitor, a repository for everything in Hogwarts that had been lost. Helga all over, providing the exact sort of help you needed, taking in that which had no home.

Her heart ached at the thought, but the ache must have been imaginary. She grew stronger as they walked, pulling from the ambient magic of the castle, but she was, for now, still little more than a shade.

 _“It’s perfect,”_ she’d told Salazar, all those years ago. “ _The castle will stand until the end of time. We’ve made sure of that. It’s so full of magic, magic to draw from, magic to hide in - it already feels alive. An extra presence-”_

 _“You think no one will notice a piece of your_ soul _embedded in the castle,”_ he’d cut in.

They hadn’t. They never had. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say no one living ever had. Helena, somehow, had known. Had found her. What a curious way to grow closer, over the centuries, both of them dead and whispering to one another in spite of it. But the last people who might have found her secret, Helga and Godric, had died a millennia ago, never knowing Hogwarts was –

“ _A horcrux,”_ he had whispered. “ _You want me to help you—”_

_“To create one, you must rend your soul.”_

_“And who were you planning to kill?”_

_“Someone wretched. And then you’ll make me a poison…”_

Slow-acting, untraceable. Helga was an able healer, but she’d been unable to find the source of Rowena’s mysterious illness as she withered away.

They’d said she died of a broken heart.

She supposed there was some truth in that.

“What was Gryffindor’s?” the boy was asking. Of course – his house.

“That, you’ve certainly seen some of,” she said obligingly. “The headmaster’s office – that was his. The griffin statue which guards it, the spiral staircase. There’s more to it, naturally, all sorts of little features, many of which have been lost to time, no doubt, but that was his personal office. I think he’d have liked that it’s still in use.”

“Why is it just… you?” he asked then. “That’s here still. I mean, not that I’m – I’m not saying…” he trailed off.

“Don’t worry. I haven’t taken offense. Why me? The others...” She wondered how much she could say without giving herself away. Someday, if her plans went as they ought, she’d have to tell the boy the truth.

But for now – “I was the one best suited for it.”

-

They finally arrived at the Astronomy Tower.

“Oh,” said Harry, with evident surprise. “Er. This is yours?”

She climbed the narrow stairs without answering, feeling them under her feet for the first time in so long.

“It is,” she said. “Are you disappointed?”

“No!” he said quickly. “I’ve always liked it up here. During Astronomy lessons, I mean. It’s… it’s really lovely. You have the best view of the grounds from here.”

She paused in her inspection of the tower. “Yes,” she said. “You do. My animagus form was – is – a raven. I used to transform and fly from here to the boundaries of the wards and back.”

“Really? Is that why – I mean, is that where your name came from? I always thought you lot had sort of, er. Odd names, even for magical people.”

“That was its origin, yes. We created them ourselves. They were names for our houses – for the pupils we took on. In my time, people didn’t have surnames, as you do now. Those came later.”

She noticed he was hanging to her every word. An apt pupil, then. Good.

She raised her hand, lifting her face to the ceiling, and whispered a word.

"And then there was this,” she murmured.

The walls seemed to vanish around them. Harry stumbled, and she caught his arm as he made to fall. “It’s only an illusion,” she said. The tower was gone, then, all but the bit of floor beneath their feet, and in its place was a brilliant sky full of stars.

“ _Wow,”_ the boy said. “This is… really beautiful.”

“Do you have a favorite constellation?” she asked.

He turned red. “Not really,” he admitted. “I don’t… pay much attention, in Astronomy, I mean.”

“Then we’ll have a look at mine. Virgo,” she said, and with a wave of her hand, the stars around them seemed to shift and it was as though they were flying through space. A constellation came into focus just above their heads.

She let herself sink into the sensation of dizzying space, the contrast of light, dazzling. _Virgo._ Always feminine, these stars, in every myth. They were Demeter and her daughter Persephone, the child she’d gone to the underworld for, or else Erigone, who hung herself in grief. _Such awful stories we affix to them,_ she thought.

“It feels like we’re really there,” the child said with obvious awe. "Or they're here."

“I believe if they were here,” she said, amused, “We’d be dead. Burnt to a crisp.

"Or perhaps not – I’ve been told that all the stars we see are dead. It’s only that their light takes so long to reach us.”

-

“You must have missed this,” said Harry. She’d shown him several constellations now, and given in to the urge to lay on the floor to gaze at them. If the child thought this was odd, he didn’t show it.

“Yes,” she whispered. “I’ve missed this very much.”

“It must have been very lonely, all these years.”

She turned to regard the boy. He was sweet, she thought. Sweeter than she recalled twelve-year-old boys generally being. “Yes,” she admitted. “Very much so.” It was terrible being alone with her memories, being alone as nothing _but_ memory, for all that time. Recalling every mistake she’d ever made, every failure, was bitterly painful, second only to recalling all the brief moments of joy her short life had held.

She had brief respite, now and then, in the ghost of her daughter, but that, too, was tainted by her recollection of all the things she'd gotten wrong.

Forgetfulness truly was a balm upon the world.

“But you’re not alone anymore,” the child said, firmly, and she rewarded him with a smile. The stubbornness – some might’ve compared him to Godric, but no, no, that was all Salazar. He reminded her very much of Salazar, a creature born of the dark, familiar with it, but viciously, tenaciously, clinging to every shred of hope he was given. He lacked, however, the bitterness, and that, she thought, made all the difference.

_Now was her chance to get things right._

Helena had made a good choice with this boy. Together, they would change the world. She knew ways to hide, ways to form shelter. She knew half a dozen ways to create a new body, at least three of which even a half-trained child could assist with.

“No, not anymore,” she said. “Nor are you.”

 

 

**XVIII. Oh, sweep away, Angel, with Angelic Scorn, the Dogs that come with Curious Eyes to gaze.**

 

The thing that had once been Voldemort, who had once been Tom Riddle, floated. Wandered. Wandered as it had wandered since it had first been cast out of the body of Quirinus Quirrell over a year prior, now.

It grew stronger.

It hovered, especially, when it could, near magical villages. It listed. It learned, this way, of the goings-on of the world it hoped soon to rejoin.

 _Soon, soon, soon,_ it whispered as though soothing itself, a mantra. The thing that had once been Tom Riddle had learned, long ago, how to soothe itself, in its tiny orphanage room. _Soon soon soon—_

Soon, surely, he would be able to make himself known to one of his useless followers. Soon he would have a body again, a means by which to return to his former glory, and to hunt down that _boy—_

And speaking of the boy – there was, in the air that day, around the village where he hovered, something sharp. The tang of fear. A prisoner had escaped from Azkaban. A mass murderer.

_Sirius Black._

He knew the man was innocent of the crimes he’d been accused of – how could he not? The real traitor, Pettigrew, had been in his employ, and Black had not. A ripple of something like amusement went through him at the idea of it. The loyal, brave Black, thrown into prison for the betrayal of his closest friends. He did wonder what had happened to Pettigrew. They said he’d been blown to bits, the only thing left of him a finger, but in his experience, rats like that _persevered._ He was in no hurry to find the useless man, but he could believe that he’d managed to scurry off somewhere.

And now Black was free again. Would he kill Pettigrew, he wondered? Get himself thrown back in Azkaban? He was supposed to be after Harry Potter, and Voldemort had little doubt that he _was,_ though not to murder him, finish the alleged job. He was the child’s godfather, wasn’t he? Likely he sought to make up for lost time. Take him in.

Voldemort suspected that he’d fail at it. No, half-mad from Azkaban, he’d let himself be caught again, no doubt, and he’d be Kissed before anyone was the wiser.

-

Unknown to either of them, once the thing which had been Voldemort crossed paths with the Grim that was sometimes Sirius Black. They were, both of them, near Little Whinging, although the large black dog knew where he was going, and Voldemort was only passing time. 

The dog wondered, as it stared down the street where Lily's sister lived, how Harry had grown up. How he was faring. He wondered if he was alright.

The thing which had once been Voldemort wondered again if Black would be foolish enough to get himself caught and killed. If he could have smirked, then, he would - because then who would young Harry Potter have left?

 

 

**[Memorial Suspiria]**

 

On the second story of 4 Privet Drive was a small room – the smallest room of the house, in fact, barring one under-the-stairs cupboard.

Ordinarily the room would, at this time of night, be quite dark, its one high window badly placed to let in the moonlight.

On this evening, however, something within it glowed softly. A ball of light, no bigger than the palm of a boy’s hand, hovered at the foot of Harry Potter’s bed.

“Well done,” said the dark-haired woman who sat beside him at the foot of that bed.

Harry grinned, and it glowed nearly as bright as the light did. As his focus shifted, the ball of light wavered, but did not blink out.

“Focus,” the woman chided him gently.

“Sorry,” he said, and he was. This was the first wandless magic he’d properly managed so far, and it had taken ages for him to learn.

Rowena said that in her time, people hadn’t needed to use wands, not really – they’d had staffs and swords and all sorts of other things, for focus, she said, but wandless magic was quite ordinary and so she was quite certain he could learn it. He was determined not to let her down.

And anyway, apparently there was something called a Trace that told the Ministry when underaged witches and wizards did magic outside of school, but it only worked if you were using a wand. It couldn’t pick up wandless magic, and so that’s what he was learning. Not that he thought the Trace would stop her if she put her mind to it. He had a feeling that Rowena Ravenclaw knew a way around it. He had a feeling that she knew lots of things.

“Don’t worry,” she said soothingly, “You’re doing very well for someone your age. And it may seem simple, but that’s a useful bit of magic to know. After this,” she said, “You’ll always have light when you need it.”

“Yeah,” Harry agreed. He imagined what it would be like, now, having the ability to summon illumination. Rowena had already talked about taking him back to the Chamber when he returned to Hogwarts. It would, she had said, be a good place to meet so he could keep learning. She promised him there were ways in and out of the castle she would show him. He imagined a lot of those passages were probably pretty dark, but now he had _this._

Yes, he thought, reaching out tentatively to touch the glowing orb. This would come in handy. He would never be stranded in darkness again.

So much had happened between the night he met Rowena and now. When the attacks on the school began and ended with Mrs. Norris’ petrification, most had written it off as a cruel prank. Whatever Rowena had done to the diary had quieted it, and Harry had no more headaches or lost time. Things had gotten better for him. But the student body still knew Harry as a Parselmouth. They still watched him suspiciously in the halls, followed him with narrowed eyes.

Even if he hadn’t attacked Mrs. Norris, he spoke Parseltongue, and they wouldn’t soon forget that.

They looked at him and thought they saw the Heir.

 _And I am_ , he thought. _I am._

_I am the heir of something._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Cagot”, in the first section, is presumably a reference to the Cagots, a people who “were a persecuted and despised minority found in the west of France and northern Spain: the Navarrese Pyrenees, Basque provinces, Béarn, Aragón, Gascony and Brittany”. They were forced to live separately from the rest of society, restricted even from touching non-cagots. What’s fascinating is that they were essentially only different in name from the non-cagots – they did not have their own language and were not an ethnic or religious group. There were various excuses given for their persecution, but none had real backing. I thought the connection between this bit of history and HP’s in-universe persecution was interesting. 
> 
> “Lethe”, from the second section, is the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and/or one of the five rivers of the underworld of Greek myth, Hades.
> 
> The final section title, Memorial Suspiria, comes from the extant portion of Suspiria de Profundis (Sighs from the Deep).  
> -  
> I hope you enjoyed this story! It was very much an... experience... to write. 
> 
> Let me know what you think.


End file.
